The purpose of the proposed research is to examine the relationship between people's mental representations of aging, particularly in terms of what is accessible in their memory when they think of being old. The application contains three experiments/studies: the first concerns younger and older adults mental representations of aging, the second concerns how those mental representations affect performance on both verbal and nonverbal memory tasks that vary in required cognitive effort. The third study investigates whether older adults memory performance can be improved through changing attributions about aging and memory decline.